The present technique relates to an interconnect, and to a method of handling supplementary data within an interconnect.
It is known to provide systems in which a number of master devices and a number of slave devices are coupled together via an interconnect. Via the interconnect, routes can be established between the master devices and slave devices to enable system data to be routed between those master and slave devices.
Within such systems, there is also a desire to produce supplementary data which can be used to monitor and analyse the operation of the system. Unlike the system data that relates to the functional operation of the system, the supplementary data is not required in order to ensure the functional operation of the system, but can provide useful information for assessing how the system is operating.
One issue that arises is how to efficiently transport such supplementary data within the system. It is important that the transport of such supplementary data exhibits non-intrusive behaviour with respect to the operation of the system, because in order to have an accurate view of how the system operates during use the act of observation must not change the system's behaviour.
With this in mind, one known approach for transferring the supplementary data is to employ a dedicated interconnect for that purpose, separate to the interconnect used to transport the system data. However, there is a significant cost to such an approach in the form of chip area, leakage power, wiring congestion, and time to design and integrate such a dedicated interconnect within the system.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved mechanism for transporting supplementary data within such a system, whilst ensuring the above-mentioned non-intrusive behaviour.